Robert Ryan played men who had already lost and had not yet been told, and he let us watch the news arrive. The heavies paid his rent; the stillness underneath them was the art. Few actors of his generation reward a second look as well.
Fi1m perspective
In The Racket (1951) a gangster called Nick Scanlon is told to calm down, and he does, and it is the most frightening thing in the film. Ryan's temper was never the point. What he did better than almost anyone was the moment after the temper, when a man realises the people he thought he owned have turned on him and the knowledge goes across his face before he can stop it. We were properly frightened of him in that scene and we still are, because the calm tells you what the shouting was hiding.
He came to films from the stage and small parts in the early 1940s and broke through in 1947 as the anti-Semite in Crossfire. That set the pattern for a decade of noir and westerns: the ageing boxer who will not throw the fight in The Set-Up (1949), the burnt-out policeman in On Dangerous Ground (1951), Reno Smith standing over a small town opposite Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). The sixties were mostly supporting work in war films and westerns, and then two late parts that critics still reach for: the weary bounty hunter Deke Thornton in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) and Larry Slade in The Iceman Cometh (1973), the year he died. He was never the star Mitchum or Lancaster was, and it is hard not to think the industry got that wrong.
The instrument was the eyes and how little he did with the rest. He could hold a face still and let a look do the work of a page of dialogue, and the directors who understood that got the best of him. Nicholas Ray and Robert Wise, two films each, gave him men who were hard and hurt at once, and those are the performances that hold up. He made three films with Robert Mitchum, and The Racket shows the difference between them plainly: Mitchum barely wakes up, and Ryan is awake, uncomfortably so, from his first scene to his last. It is the one performance in that film we would send anyone to see, and the film around it does not deserve him.
The cost of all this was typecasting. Once Hollywood had seen him do menace it kept asking for menace, and the sympathetic leads went elsewhere. Plenty of the eighty-odd pictures were beneath him; Lonelyhearts (1958) is the usual example, and there are others. He knew it. "Eighty pictures. And seventy of them were dogs. I mean, dogs." That is roughly our count too. He was right about the dogs, and he was the best thing in most of them.
Biography
Robert Ryan (1909–1973) was an American actor known for his roles in film noir and Westerns. He appeared as Nick Scanlon in The Racket (1951) and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Crossfire (1947). Other notable films include The Set-Up (1949), The Naked Spur (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Professionals (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969).
Ryan was born in Chicago and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1932, where he was the heavyweight boxing champion. He served in the United States Marine Corps during the Second World War as a drill instructor. He also worked in the theatre and received a Drama Desk Award for a 1971 revival of Long Day's Journey into Night.
